Re: CROCODILE ?MYTHS?

[JCMcL <darwincr@laplaza.taos.nm.us>]

On Wed, 24 Jan 1996, Nicholas R. Longrich wrote:

> 
>       I believe that it 
> is an attempt to describe how extinctions could result from contact 
> between previously isolated populations of dinosaurs: i.e. [Bakker's] 
ideas 
> about dinosaurs coming into competition, spreading diseases to each 
> other, etc. and thereby causing ectinctions. I haven't read the book, but 
> I read an article which I think was actually an excerpt from it.
>       Personally, I think the theory is completely untenable, at least 
> as an explanation of the K-T extinctions. For one, you've got animals 
> close enough to each other to be put into the same genus (at least by 
> some authors) or else that bear strong resemblences to each other, on
> both sides of the Bering from a few million years prior 
> to the K-T extinctions- Saurolophus, T rex and bataar, Velociraptor, 
> Edmontosaurus and Shantungosaurus, etc. For another, anybody who knows 
> anything about epidemiology can tell you that postulating disease as the 
> cause of the K-T extinction, or, for that matter, the Pleistocene 
> extinction, is, to use strict scientific terms, a bunch of hooey.
> 

There is also the contact between the mammalian "world" of South America 
and the North American/Eurasian/African "World Continent" during the 
Pliocene.  No worldwide dieoff, no mass extinctions in the seas.